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Alessandre
Alessandre is a former acrobat turned genetically-modified interrogator. This article contains content of sexual, physical, and mental abuse, underage sex, as well as torture and gore. Appearance Alessandre stands at a solid six feet with a lithe, wiry frame, but that's hardly the most striking feature he has. Even his pale skin and black hair, which are striking on their own, fall short in comparison to the almost unearthly glow of his red eyes. They're not menacing on their own, though they give him a somewhat dissonant look. With tight clothes to provide maximum maneuverability and a bandolier of six knives, with one more strapped to each leg, he's more than enough to set someone naturally on edge. Personality Most of those who have seen Alessandre will tell you the same thing: He's a strange individual. Quiet to the point of being almost a wallflower, he regards the average person with a flat sort of disdain some might say is almost kingly, or perhaps high-and-mighty. Both of these are true in some measure - Alessandre is a man who holds himself in higher regard than almost all others. He would tell you it was all others, as well. The problem arises when you catch his attention. Alessandre is very much someone who watches more than he speaks. There are times where he does speak more than act - and in those moments, he speaks both emphatically and with a certainty that is almost terrifying - but they are rare. More likely, the young man will take an interest in someone because of the purity of their reactions. Reactions are, after all, the thing that Alex loves most. They have been since he was a child, though his love for them is considerably twisted and mangled now. He wants to eke out the strongest, most powerful reactions from others. Sometimes, that means torturing them. Others, that means ensuring that they know he's tortured someone they care for or are protective over. History Come One, Come All! It was a rare thing, being born directly into the circus. If you asked someone who had been, their happiness at the event would vary considerably. For Alessandre, it was one of the highest honours he could ever have received. Rather than being born into a family with a bunch of estranged members, he had been born into a family for whom closeness was their lifeblood. As a child, Alex watched his family - blood and not - perform, and of course he asked about all of the things they did. It was a traveling big-top act, one of the largest in the country. Freakshows, clowns, death-defying stunts and cirque - they did it all. It wasn't long before he started to work alongside them - as a child with a small, wiry frame, he made an excellent cirque performer. It made sense, of course: his mother was the star act of that portion of their show. To the Show Where Nothing is Forbidden When he reached five, he had his first choice in what act he wanted to do. While Alex was comfortable enough doing cirque, the predictability of the acts didn't sit well with him. The time he felt the happiest was when he was performing difficult jumps - things where he could potentially end up injured thanks to a slip in care or a tiny beat off in timing. As such, he decided to learn tightrope acrobatics. There were no nets in their circus. They wouldn't use them in performances, so to have them in practice bred neglect otherwise. Of course, for someone who wanted full control of his surroundings, that was best. Alessandre enjoyed the height of the work, knowing that any misstep could potentially be fatal. He wasn't overly confident, but he was also still learning. It was only a matter of time before something happened, and when it did, the boy got lucky. His misstep had caused him to tumble down off of the rope and it tangled around his ankle before it snapped. Instinct alone let Alex flip himself over, and he landed hard on that same ankle. He was eight, then. Where Any Hesitation Could Prove Fatal In the end, he had ended up with a broken ankle and a very bruised ego - a very mild end to what could have been a fatality. Once his foot was bandaged, he was kept out of the show until he healed, but that wouldn't keep him from getting bored. They knew this, and as family, they tried to stem that boredom as much as they could. The act's knife thrower had taken a particular liking to Alessandre. He saw the boy's ability to be calm and calculated, and it was because of that ability that he decided to teach him how to throw. At first, Alex was resistant - knife throwing, as far as he understood it, was just as predictable as their cirque shows. Still, without the mobility to walk, throwing gave him an outlet for his growing aggression. Before he could grow bored with the predictability, Joff - the knife thrower - provided a new challenge: him. More specifically, when he found Alessandre boredly tossing knives at the board one morning (they all took turns returning the knives to the boy when he ran out), he simply stepped in front of it. Alex was surprised by the action, naturally, but quickly found it aroused a whole new kind of excitement in him. He requested Joff's assistance for the remainder of his hospital stay, and though there were a few clumsy moments, Alessandre had laser-straight aim by the time he was out and walking again. Pleased with his progress, Joff actually offered to allow Alessandre to take over when he retired. It was still a few years off, but Alessandre accepted it immediately. But Fear Not, and Gaze Upon the Allure of the Stars! His life continued, largely, as it had been before the injury - though Alessandre himself began training to take over Joff's position. When the youth was thirteen, he was officially taken in as the designated knife thrower. The level of excitement in this change rose as he began performing - first by himself, creating intricate designs and shapes with the toss of his blades, and then with volunteers from the crowd. As an attractive young man with a lithe body and such beautifully precise aim, there were no shortage of ladies swooning over him. The fact that he controlled their life, that if he so much as twitched an inch to one side he could kill or disfigure them, thrilled him to no end. It didn't take long before he was taking their lives into his own hands - if Alessandre found himself particularly attracted to a volunteer or his/her reactions, he would intentionally cause shallow surface scrapes or too-close calls. No one could blame him, of course, and most of them assumed it was their own error that caused the injury. This was especially easy to think when Alex would draw forward and gently wipe away any blood, ensuring that the volunteer was alright, all of the sinister intent hidden behind a kind and concerned face. He took many of these volunteers to bed starting when he was fifteen, engaging in careful manipulations and control-based sexual deviancy that earned him a dark, alluring reputation. Within a year, he was known as someone you should stay away from, but who could draw you in at a moment's notice, and none of them could quite put a finger on why. For We Are Professionals, and Danger is Our World For two years, Alessandre continued this way. His depravity grew over time, sometimes stepping just barely into dangerous, but his silver tongue continued to earn him partners. It helped, no doubt, that he was as good at pleasing others as entrancing them. Still, all good things must come to an end. One night, he chose a volunteer as usual - one who had performed the most beautiful, terrified display he had seen in his entire time as a knife thrower - and he took her to bed. The events of the night are hazy at best in his memory, even now. He could recall her speaking softly, pleading and begging for less, then more, and then everything had turned fuzzy. Drugs, he would come to know, had been in play that night. It didn't matter much when he awoke in a white room, one that smelled heavily of chemical cleaners. Attempts to rise were stopped by heavy straps on his limbs, and he demanded answers. He would get none, of course, from the myriad of doctors and scientists that came and went. However angry he got, he couldn't find a way to free himself. And Sometimes, All Is Lost Trying to pay attention to the amount of time that passed was all but impossible. Days bled into weeks and months, and each time they finished their daily battery of tests, Alex was led into a small room with nothing but a cot and, if they were feeling kind, some books. For someone used to excitement and control, this was essentially his worst nightmare. Every day, they strapped him down to a table and did as they pleased, observing his reactions. Removing skin, removing limbs or severing muscle. Their only response when asked about it was that he was too weak to stop it, so what right did he have to complain? And then, after what felt like years but was probably closer to six or eight months, they saw him to another room - a different room indeed. This one still had the white walls he was now used to, but it was circular, and about its floor were other individuals. Far above, glass panels allowed masked men and women to observe. A voice crackled into existence to explain, finally, what their purpose was here. They were to become weapons. More accurately, they were already in the process of becoming individualised super-soldiers, and now they were moving into a different phase: weeding out the weak. For their first task, ten could survive out of some twenty-five they had gathered. Once it was explained, weapons dropped from the ceiling. These would be weekly tournaments, often to the death of one (or more - there were group fights as well) participant. Each time, the winner was rewarded - first with better lodgings, then with little perks. Ah, but Alessandre recognised them for what they were - positive reinforcement, done to create obedient soldiers. That, he would refuse to stoop to. He would accept their 'kindness' of course, climbing the ranks until he was among the most dangerous of their soldiers to live. Sometimes, the Line Between Man and Beast Blurs You couldn't just call someone who fought well a super-soldier, though. No, the scientists and doctors were creating men and women to do their dirty work. Alessandre's first change, or perhaps the first one he noticed, is that they had mangled something in his senses. Touch had become something he could sense only on a cursory level, and in its dulling, his sense of pain had similarly fallen away. Whether these were intended or not, he never knew. That particular side-effect, however, became the slow-burning fuel for his ire. Pain was something he had come to know as a definition of living, and being taken from it was a slap in the face. He had come to control his pain, when it happened. In response to the lack of stimulus, his fighting style became dirty and erratic, taking injury just to feel even a little. It became more prominent as he felt less - even the serums they injected in him, strong things that had once sent pain screaming through his body, began to leave a pleasant tingle at best. In response, the scientists changed their serums. He realised it almost before they did, as his ability to heal increased to an impossible degree. He almost laughed, except that ''alteration also caused a chain-reaction of changes. Now, in addition to his inability to feel pain, he found himself uncontrollably aroused when someone would cut into his skin and move whatever instrument they held about. One of the scientists recognised this, and she used it against him without remorse. In fact, she seemed quite satisfied by it, taking away the control he so loved. Her scars were the last of the ones that stuck, as they continued to accelerate Alessandre's healing until even heavy wounds wouldn't stay. Others, the Line Can't Even be Seen There were those who treated Alessandre with kindness, though. One such man was a surgeon - a stuttering, bespectacled man who apologised for each time he had to change part of Alex's physicality. Mostly, these were superficial or medical changes, and he spoke of his family as he did them. There were no anesthetics used, not that it mattered to Alex himself. The most intense procedure the young man - now nearly twenty, though he had long since stopped counting time - remembered was the hours-long procedure in which his eyes were removed and replaced. Pumped full of drugs to keep him from so much as moving so much as a muscle, it took him until the first eye went completely dead before he realised what was happening. Still, the transplant went flawlessly, thanks in part to his healing factor. During his healing, Alex was seen to by all of his normal ''doctors, given injections he couldn't feel that warped his mind with an ever-growing hatred. If this was their intent as they created their super-soldiers, he thought they were off the mark. They made him wait six weeks before they allowed him to take off the bandages. He'd noticed immediately that everything was clearer somehow, colours and vision brighter than before. At first, even staring at his rapidly-healing hands (injuries he had no memory of receiving), he couldn't figure out why it was. It was another week before they put him back in the arena, this time with a number of others who had similarly transplanted eyes. His own had once been a light, honey-brown - now, they were almost demonic, a faintly glowing red. He found it amusing somehow, and it did nothing to slow or change his abilities. They continued to inject things into his eyes after that, a daily frustration of blurry needles and the occasional sense of cold as fluid filled his eyeball. Behold! The Monster That is Man! During one of his arena matches, Alessandre stumbled upon the fruits of all the injections into his eyes. It surprised everyone when he summoned darkness from nowhere - though he himself wouldn't know that it was darkness until someone told him after the fact. He could, after all, see perfectly within its depths. That gave him the edge he would need to get out of this place later; a plan had already started to form in his mind at its advent. He would need a partner and some time to prepare, and then he could finally set it into motion. He found a partner in Eli, a chaotic young man who had received powers that could cancel his own. The point was, he guessed, to have a fail-safe. If you had someone who could overcome another, then if one were to get out of hand, they could neutralise one another. The only problem was that their serums, the ones meant to instill obedience, did no such thing. By weeding out the weaker soldiers, the facility had all but completely rooted out those who would be foolish enough to show their defiance openly. In fact, though, Eli proved to be more than just an ally here. He was easily controlled by someone like Alessandre, and in turn, Alessandre allowed Eli to use him as an outlet when he had to be otherwise careful - gentle, even. It helped that the other man's claws still left scars, still gave more of a sting than anything else. If you asked, he would admit that he'd spent a good deal of time gently shaping Eli in a manner similar to the way he had once shaped his volunteers, though for wholly different reasons. For the first time, he felt something akin to love for another, though he would never show or admit that fact. When he had begun making his plans with Eli, he had thought to leave the surgeon who had transplanted his eyes out of his wrath. After all, the man had been so mousy, always talking about his family. Except... when he was in the midst of his plans, he had overheard that man talking to another doctor about his true feelings. That he had trouble keeping up the facade of a kind soul, how his trembling hands were ecstasy, and not uncertainty at all. If it were anyone else, he might have been able to get by on the fact that he had been nothing but kind to Alessandre and the fact that his hands trembled little when he had been working with him. Because it was Alessandre himself, he took it as a direct slight to his control and an unknown that was held aloft, just out of reach until that day. Watch as He Approaches His Goal Without Fail! The day he mobilised all of the disgruntled experiments he could was the height of proof as far as how poorly the facility had judged its occupants. A squad of super-soldiers, hardened as they were, could go through the average human like paper, and before they had made it to the exit door, an army of bodies lay behind them. A handful of the worst individuals had escaped when the alarm went off, and it wasn't hard to learn that this was neither the main nor the first facility this group had. None of the others seemed to pay any mind, but for Alex, that information was important - for his plan to work out, he had to cut the head off of the snake. To that end, he took every personnel file he could find, tossing away those whose faces he remembered amongst corpses and who had no family to speak of. More importantly, he had two individuals to get hold of before they moved forward with his plan - a plan that involved only himself and Eli now, as the rest of the men and women had dispersed. The surgeon who had replaced his eyes would be first and easiest, and then the lady scientist who had lorded her control over him so profusely. It took a few weeks to set it all up - a safe place for the torture, gaining a reputation, getting rid of any opposition. Still, before long Alex had his first nemesis tied to a chair in a dank cellar. He tortured him for a day, removing one hand and peeling back the nails of the other before cutting into his shoulders, severing the tendons and muscles that were required for fine motor control. Once he'd cauterised those wounds and allowed the man to rest, he returned to give the surgeon the same treatment Alessandre had gotten - he removed his eyes. Since he'd done it with one of his knives instead of a scalpel, there was no chance of really implanting a new eye, but Alex wasn't satisfied with that. He placed heated coals into the man's sockets, then closed his eyelids to sear them shut. The surgeon didn't survive it all; Alessandre paid no mind to that and allowed Eli to take care of the body itself. It just meant he'd found the limit of the man's pain, and now he was on to the next one. She would take longer to find, drawing well into Alessandre's twentieth year and requiring a new safehouse. Fearless, He Soars Above the Crowd! The scientist was, in many ways, a much more delicate effort for Alessandre than the surgeon had been. Her actions to him had been largely sexual in nature, and so her torture would be similarly so. In fact, he had gotten hold of the strongest aphrodisiacs available to use on her, mixed with a handful of other drugs to keep her body pliant and regenerative. They talked at length during this time (though honestly, it was more appropriate to say he talked and she balked whenever she could). It was almost a perfect reversal, though she proved pleasantly more defiant than Alessandre had been. Much of their conversations were about the past, what she did and what she thought of it all. How much she enjoyed it when she was working with him, denying his control. She scarcely understood what was so important about it, but that didn't trouble her captor any. He spent three weeks with her, sparing no thought to her physical or mental well-being. It wasn't until she seemed to be at the upper limit, after being penetrated with objects too large, sharp, or hot to be taken comfortably, that he stopped - partly because she had become accustomed to the treatment (and thus had more or less succumbed to the same reactions he had to internal trauma) and partly because he had exhausted all of the information she had to give. She wouldn't be able to do anything to spite him, even had she wanted to. Like the Pendulum, Danger Swings Toward Him! Her information had proven most fruitful. It included the name of the company - Leiwel Technologies - that originally started the Gemini Project Alessandre had become a part of, as well as the locations of several other facilities participating in the Gemini Project. With these in hand, he and Eli could start working their way toward rooting out each foothold the company had, loosing their modified subjects into the world. Of course, they also needed other information and money to deal with their everyday requirements. Alessandre began reaching out to the seedy underground of his nearby city, offering his services as an interrogator. He never met with clients, so none of them knew who he was or what he did to obtain his information, and that was perfect. At current, Alessandre and Eli had settled on preparing for their first infiltration at the nearest Gemini Project facility. Category:Character Category:AU Earth